Now he entered Rome herself, and he saw just a little of a city that toiled and played and sang and dickered and laughed, plotted, feasted, sacrificed, lied, swindled, and stood by friends—a city of men and women and children like any others, built by men's hands and guarded by men's bodies. He had thought Rome was walled, but he found as he trudged through hours of buildings that she eternally outgrew her walls, as though she were a snake casting skin, so that the old gates stood open in the midst of a brawling traffic. He had thought of Romans as divided into iron-sheathed rankers, piggish man-traders, and one woman who shuddered in his arms; but he saw a gang of children playing ball in the dust, a leathery smith in a clangorous tiny shop and a limping man who cried out the roasted nuts he bore for sale in panniers slung from a yoke. He saw Romans spread their wares in flimsy booths while a temple gleamed purity above them. He saw a Roman matron, in clothes no better than his, who scolded her small boy for being reckless about passing horse-carts. He saw a young girl weeping, for some reason he never knew, and he saw two young men, merry with wine, stop to rumple the ears of an itinerant dog.
It growled about him, the heavy sound of laden wheels, echoing between grimy brick walls. A haze hung in the air, smoke and dust, tinged with garlic, cooked meat, new bread, perfume, horse dung, sewage, garbage, human sweat. Folk milled about, shouting, waving their arms, chaffering, thrusting a way past the crowds, somehow, anyhow. Once Phryne was whirled from Eodan in such an eddy. He gasped with terror, knowing he was indeed lost without her. She found her way back to him, but thereafter he held her wrist.
They threaded their way toward the Esquiline Gate. "We must find an inn," Phryne said; she had to shout through the noise. "The house is on the Viminal Hill, but we could not go there clad as we are, nor before dark in any case."
Eodan nodded dumbly. He let her lead him under the portal. A distance beyond it was a shabby district of tall wooden tenements, where the streets were slimy with refuse and the landless, workless scourings of war and debt crouched in their rags waiting for the next dole. He was too tired even to feel anger at the shouts from tooth-rotten mouths. "Hail, peasant! A son of the soil, there are straws in his hair! Aha, will you not lend us that pretty boy for a while? No, he will not—they're a hard-fisted lot, these farmers. Cisalpine Gauls for certain, see the ox look about 'em. But then where are their Gaulish breeches? Ha, ha, lost their breeches, did they—now was it at dice or what?"
Phryne, gone pale with wrath, led Eodan through twisted alleys until they found an inn. The landlord sat outside, yawning and picking his teeth with a thumbnail. "We would have a room for ourselves," she said. "Half a sesterce," said the landlord. "Half a sesterce for this flea pit? One copper as!" cried Phryne. They haggled while Eodan shuffled his feet and looked about.
When at last he was alone with her, in a windowless box of a room, he said, "The night winds take you, girl, what do we care for a copper more or less? I feel a fool every place we stop, listening to you!"
"I wonder what they would have thought of two people who did not bargain?" purred Phryne. "That they were in a suspicious haste to get off the streets?"
It was too murky to read her face, but he had come to know that tone. He could almost have traced out the quirk of her mouth and the mockery of her eyes. "Oh, well, you rescued me again," he said. "I am a blundering dolt. What shall we do next, captain, sir?"
"You have a wit like a bludgeon," she said. "Be quiet and let me think." She threw herself on a pile of moldy straw and looked up at a ceiling hidden as much by grime as by dimness.
Eodan hunched among the stinks and choked down his wrath. She had saved him too often, in the days that lay behind. Her right to badger him was earned.